In 2019, a 5-year roadmap was developed at Ipswich City Council (ICC)) to improve the organisation's asset management maturity and capability following a significant audit. In 2023, stage 3 began - implementing a governance structure with clear roles and responsibilities in response to the cultural challenges identified.
ICC experienced low levels of understanding of asset lifecycles across the business, accompanied by a possessive attitude toward budgets and an ‘it’s not my decision’ culture, resulting in delays at the expense of asset health.
Building a culture of collaboration and developing collaborative practices to address the challenges was seen as the main path to success.
Edgar Schein’s model of culture* suggests three layers to organisational culture: artefacts - visible representations of culture; espoused values – the things the organisation says they care about, and underlying assumptions - shared tacit assumptions that influence everything else. All layers must be addressed to sustain culture change. An effective way to do this is to tell real stories from the organisation that reinforce values and challenge unhelpful shared assumptions.
We created a playbook for collaborative asset management at Ipswich City Council to tell stories about collaborative “plays” (scenarios) that reinforced organisational values and demonstrated how collaboration could be effective. The playbook then became an artefact that represented asset management at its best.
We started by conducting a series of worked asset management examples and supported the teams involved to develop a collaborative mindset and skills. We then captured the impact of this throughout each of the projects and the lessons learned along the way.
This presentation will outline our process for creating the Collaborative Asset Management Playbook for Ipswich City Council, the benefits realised and how Council will keep the playbook relevant and front of mind for professionals working in the broader asset management function.